She looked toward the distant road.
"All right."
He cleared his throat.
"And Mom?"
"What?"
"I'm not trying to take the ranch away from you."
She swallowed.
"I know."
But after the call ended, she admitted something privately.
She had not always known.
Sometimes her son's suggestions about selling had sounded too much like the banker's assumptions.
Older woman.
Large ranch.
Expensive upkeep.
Surely she would eventually give in.
She had been hearing versions of that argument for years.
But her son was not the banker.
He had a history with the land too.
A difficult history.
And perhaps they needed to talk about it honestly before another generation inherited their silence.
Chapter 11: The Missing Page
The missing survey plat was not where anyone expected it to be.
The courthouse records supervisor searched the older deed books.
The original 1957 instrument was intact.
The recorded language was clear.
But the attached survey exhibit had been separated from the scanned pages during an archival conversion completed years earlier.
The supplemental 1959 reference also proved difficult to locate.
The book number existed.
The page number existed.
But the digital index did not recognize the document under the ranch family's surname.
The clerk suspected an old spelling error.
The attorney suspected a recording-index issue.
The ranch woman suspected that the courthouse had finally discovered a problem old enough to deserve its own birthday cake.
By Wednesday afternoon, four people were searching.
The records supervisor.
The attorney.
The daughter.
And the granddaughter, who had persuaded everyone that her ability to read blurry scans was useful rather than merely evidence of too much time on a computer.
The ranch woman waited beside a table stacked with archival boxes.
The room was cool and dry.
Rows of shelves held records reaching back more than a century.
The granddaughter leaned toward a monitor.
"Grandma, what was the name of the family that owned the neighboring land in 1959?"
The older woman answered.
The teenager typed.
Then she frowned.
"Was the property ever owned by a husband and wife jointly?"
"Yes."
"Both names on the deed?"
"I believe so."
The girl looked at the attorney.
"Could the supplemental grant be indexed under the wife's name?"
The attorney considered.
"Certainly possible."
The records supervisor moved toward another computer.
She searched a different name.
A result appeared.
Then another.
Finally, a deed book entry dated October 1959 came onto the screen.
The ranch woman's heart began to pound.
"Is that it?"
The supervisor opened the scan.
An old document filled the monitor.